Google to flag inaccurate and upsetting or offensive Contents in SERP

Google in an effort to curtail fake news, will be employing data from human "quality raters" to teach its algorithms to better spot inaccurate and offensive information, thereby eliminating such from search result pages.

While Google’s quality raters, comprising over 10,000 contractors that Google uses worldwide to evaluate search results, will then rate pages that appear in the result pages.

Using a set of guidelines on how to assess website quality, the quality raters rate pages based on accuracy and relevancy, and with the data, Google tends to improve its overall search algorithms.

Before now, Google's quality raters had produced data used to improve Google’s search algorithms generally, now the guidelines have been updated with a new section about “Upsetting/Offensive” content that includes a new flag for raters to use.

Albeit, marking a particular result as upsetting or offensive won't suppress it immediately from the search result, rather, it's meant to train Google's algorithms to understand such low-quality contents.

And the data will eventually impact on low-quality pages that are spotted by the raters, as well as on others that weren’t reviewed.

This is coming on the heels of criticism on Google and Facebook for not doing enough about misinformation circulating on their platforms during the past U.S. presidential elections. Meanwhile, Facebook has equally taken steps in same direction with the launch of disputed tags.